06/22/2020In 1983, there were two music faculty members, and before them lay a challenge: find the missing piece. Bruce Gustafson and Courtney Adams, both musicologists, had a mandate to create a music department within a liberal arts context. They believed the missing piece was a composer—a practitioner of music. The Dean, however, felt differently: F&M, after all, was a liberal arts college, not a conservatory. A theorist was needed. And so, a compromise was reached: a position was created for a faculty member who would "teach theory courses from the perspective of a composer" (the ghost of Franklin surely beamed). In 1984, Prof. John Carbon was hired and proved to be exactly what was missing.Music Department